Ezra Klein: April 11, 2010 - April 17, 2010

Today I looked at four possible goals for financial-regulation reform, doubted the existence of a middle way on obesity and considered whether Goldman Sachs has become the Anthem Blue Cross of FinReg. Here's what I didn't get to: 1) Goldman...

Steve Pearlstein thinks there's a "50-50" chance that the Senate passes a major energy bill this year. Many in the environmental community have come around to Kerry's view that this is the best shot they are going to have...

I'm going to do a series next week explaining the various elements of financial reform, as I think this debate has moved a whole lot faster than public understanding. But for the purposes of this post, it's worth very quickly...

Blanche Lincoln's derivatives bill is up. It's called "The Wall Street Transparency & Accountability Act of 2010," and you can get the text, the summary, and the section-by-section here. And it's good timing for Lincoln: The Goldman Sachs fraud filing...

Mark Calabria argues that the current moment of low home prices, low interest rates and broad recognition that it should not be official government policy to push people into bigger and bigger homes is ripe to eliminate the mortgage interest...

Confused about the SEC's fraud filing against Goldman Sachs? You're probably not alone. Let's try this two ways. First, let's play it straight: Goldman Sachs let hedge-fund manager John Paulson select the subprime-mortgage bonds that he thought likeliest to explode...

Remember when Matt Taibbi made waves for calling Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity"? Well: Last night, at a fundraiser in Florida, President Obama demonstrated just how hard he plans to take it to...

Looks like Mitch McConnell is having some trouble holding Senate Republicans to a filibuster strategy on financial reform. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) does not have enough solid commitments from GOP lawmakers to block consideration of a Democratic...

This is a pretty important question, I think, and not one that there's any real consensus on. I can think of at least four things that you'd want to do with financial-regulation reform, some of which overlap, and all of...

NPR's Planet Money posts some IRS data that allows us to compare the 400 richest Americans' income and tax payment: "The Top 400 are considerably more talented than the rest of us," writes Matt Yglesias. "And this decline in their...

It's one thing to be an ideologue willing to lie for your cause. It's a whole other to be embarrassed about being an ideologue willing to lie for your cause. So c'mon, Bill O'Reilly: Have some pride! Just for the...

As I've now heaped a lot of praise on Marc Ambinder's article on the obesity crisis, let me offer up some criticism, too. In the beginning, Ambinder engages in a bit of unfortunate even-handism. "Each side is held in...

Jon Kingsdale (pictured) is the founding executive director of the Massachusetts Connector. That is to say, he built and runs the insurance exchange at the heart of the Massachusetts health-care reform. And as Alec MacGillis reports, he's resigning. "In...

"When asked what presents a bigger risk over the next year, 23 economists said accelerating inflation and 23 said slowing inflation." That comes from the Wall Street Journal's forecasting survey, and is probably making life really interesting inside the Federal...

Good morning! You know, it's supposed to be 74 degrees today here in Washington. And my taxes are done. And it's Friday! Yep, I'm looking forward to the weekend. In fact, everything's really going swimmingly this morn- The European Central...

Today I interviews Sens. Mark Warner and Bob Corker, tried to clarify the confused discussion over the taxes paid by the poor, and gave Blanche Lincoln props for sending a long-overdue "shudder" through Wall Street. Here's what I didn't get...

Christopher Papagianis, a former special assistant for domestic policy to George W. Bush, has a smart critique of the Dodd bill's approach to executing systemically important, failed banks. His critique, essentially, is that it doesn't do enough to hurt...

As head of the FDIC, Bush appointee Sheila Bair is in charge of dismantling failed banks. As The Hill wrote, Bair has been fiercely critical of the pro-bank shape of the financial rescue. "Market discipline," she's said, "must be more...

Blanche Lincoln is really preparing to lay the smack down on the derivatives market. The proposal by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), who chairs the Agriculture Committee, sent shudders through Wall Street. For nearly two decades, five U.S. banks --...

Here's my question for folks who think slight changes in marginal tax rates will drive rich people to move to another country: How do you explain New York? According to the Tax Foundation, it's got the second-highest tax rates in...

Reading the continuing discussion on whether the poor pay enough in taxes, I think people are probably getting increasingly confused. So let's get one thing straight: There's no federal income tax bracket of 0 percent. If you're making income, you're...

Lots of people are making fun of financial adviser Mike Donahue's cry for understanding, and for lower tax rates. I will join them. Since I graduated in 1983, I have been in straight commission sales and have had many 60-...

In negotiations stretching from the spring of 2009 to February of 2010, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) worked together to agree on financial-regulation bill. Their work produced the resolution authority section of Dodd's legislation, which is to...

Annie Lowrey brings the data: Wondering what’s behind those recent jobless recovery numbers? 1. Fortune 500 companies tripled their profits to $391 billion in 2009. 2. They also slashed their payrolls by more than 800,000 jobs. There's been a lot...

It's stuff like this that makes me think Wall Street executives aren't very smart. As a financial reform bill starts to take shape in Washington, two key lawmakers came to New York City last week to explain what it means...

Andy Stern is the president of SEIU, a service employees union with 2.2 million members. He led the breakaway unions that split from the AFL-CIO and formed Change to Win, and he's been a key political player during the...

So, for a long time, financial industry profits made up a huge share of the nation's total profits. Then the financial sector blew up the economy and its share of total profits dropped, as you might expect. And now? As...

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cThat's Tarifficwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party As Jon Stewart details in the clip above, some in the media have fastened on a Tax Policy Center report saying that 47...

In honor of tax day tomorrow, here's a World War II-era propaganda cartoon Disney did for the federal government to persuade Americans to pay high, wartime taxes. "Now what are you going to do? Spend for the Axis? Or save...

Washington seemed to think the resignation of Desiree Rogers, the old White House social secretary, an event of some note, prompting a wonderful outburst from Paul Krugman. But as Howard Fineman argues, there's actually something substantively interesting about her replacement,...

When Sen. Mitch McConnell said that the Senate financial-regulation bill meant "endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks," he was, knowingly or not, taking aim at a policy that had been jointly developed by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.)...

Dana Milbank notes the quiet passage of an important milestone. For anniversaries, the 50th is golden. But as Republicans returned to town on Monday to mark their 50th filibuster of this 111th Congress, there were no reminiscences about filibusters past,...

Neil Irwin has a good piece taking issue with the sudden spurt of economic optimism. The question, he argues, isn't whether we're recovering. It's how fast we're recovering. Three quarters after recovery began in the 1981 recession, GDP growth...

Health-care reform, I often whined, moved too slow. But it's worth taking a step back and noting how remarkably fast financial regulation is going. Compare the timelines of the two: Barack Obama held the White House summit that officially kicked...

Today I wondered why the experts and the staffers are so much more split on financial-regulation reform than they were on health-care reform, asked after the Republican alternative to endless bailouts and interviewed labor economist Larry Mishel about when the...

Contrary to most everyone's expectations, Blanche Lincoln appears to be developing, well, a really strong set of regulations on derivatives. According to Politico, she dropped her efforts to cooperate with Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) after he balked at putting standardized...

"Obesity is an almost inevitable consequence of living with our cultural norms, our history of agricultural production and subsidies, our long-standing socioeconomic inequalities, and the impact of technology on our behavior and bodies," writes Marc Ambinder in a terrific Atlantic...

The French Laundry's Thomas Keller is widely considered America's finest chef. And like a lot of fine chefs, he's had some lucrative offers to open a restaurant in Abu Dhabi. But as he tells Eater.com, it didn't work out, and...

Larry Mishel is a labor economist and president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Earlier today, I spoke to him about the possible end of the recession and the economic outlook for next year. There's been a lot of...

Responding to my post asking after Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell's alternative proposal to end bailouts, reader Dan B. comments: I think the implied alternative is a fire brand and populist, "let them FAIL!". However unserious this is from an...

News that SEIU Pesident Andy Stern is stepping down has produced a lot of predictable takes and political eulogies, but this one's actually fresh: Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a former SEIU employee, argues that Stern's problem was that he was never ruthless...

"If there’s one thing Americans agree on when it comes to financial reform, it’s this," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "Never again should taxpayers be expected to bail out Wall Street from its own mistakes. We cannot allow...

I spent 2009 and the beginning of 2010 reporting on health-care reform. I talked to a lot of experts and a lot of Hill and administration sources. And they were all pretty much interchangeable. Whether it was George W....

David Cho's story that the deficit is running significantly lower than it did last year has provoked a fair bit of controversy. On the one hand, the Office of Management and Budget doesn't like to see midyear numbers floating around,...

This seem like a smart way to blunt the impact of the Citizens United ruling: The White House and leading Democrats in Congress are close to proposing legislation that would force private companies and groups to disclose their behind-the-scenes financial...

Shahien Nasiripour reports that J.P. Morgan plans to go hard against policies to modify underwater mortgages because contracts are sacred documents premised on the borrowers' "promise to repay." This struck one union employee as a bit odd: After all, the...

Timothy Geithner has an op-ed in today's Washington Post arguing that "as the Senate [financial regulation] bill moves to the floor, we must all fight loopholes that would weaken it." But the loopholes he's arguing against haven't actually been unveiled...

Today I wrote about why Democrats might want to put immigration reform on the agenda, took a skeptical look at the idea that health-care reform has 10 years of taxes for six years of benefits, and looked at why Americans...

Watching the debate around the possible filibustering of the president's next Supreme Court nominee has been interesting: Consensus is that a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee is less likely than on major pieces of legislation. In fact, later...

Last week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka went to Harvard to deliver a speech on why working people are angry. It's worth a read: For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is...

Robert Shiller -- yes, of the Case-Shiller Housing Index -- thinks there's more pain in store for housing. Today, we need to worry about strong headwinds, as the government begins to withdraw its support of a still-troubled lending industry and...

Bet Against the American Dream from Alexander Hotz on Vimeo. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when “This American Life” devotes an episode to the financial crisis, you should drop what you're doing and listen to it. Their latest...

One of the odder arguments that Republicans made against the Affordable Care Act was what David Brooks termed "the 10-6 dodge." As he put it, "one of the reasons the bill appears deficit-neutral in the first decade is that it...

This New York Times graphic breaking down the consumption of different types of packaged and non-packaged food in different countries is too big to reproduce here, but well worth taking a couple of minutes to stare at. But though...

"I even heard the name Hillary Clinton today, and that would be an interesting person in the mix [for Supreme Court]," Sen. Orrin Hatch said on the "Today" show. "I happen to like Hillary Clinton, I think she's done a...

I'd say it's pretty unlikely that comprehensive immigration reform happens this year. But then, who cares what I think? Harry Reid is in charge of the Senate, and he says he's got 56 votes, and it's gonna happen. “We...

About 90% of Americans used either tax preparers or tax-preparation software in 2009. That's insane, particularly when you realize that a substantial minority of Americans either don't pay income taxes or have a very simple filing. But when people...

Business Week's Mike Dorning says that the economy is recovering much more swiftly than the political system, which tends to focus on polls, realizes. A Bloomberg national poll in March found that Americans, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, believe...

In a new paper called "Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility" (pdf), Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny offer an uncommonly clear explanation of how "financial innovation" leads to financial crises. While reading this, keep in mind that the subprime...